Here are the Ruby and Rails related technical talks given at the O’Reilly Open Source Convention 2008. A PDF of the presentation is availble for each talk, but no video at this time.

• Ruby 1.9: What to Expect
• Metaprogramming in Ruby
• What Has Ruby Done for you Lately?
• An Introduction to Ruby Web Frameworks
• Advanced ActiveRecord
• Extending Rails: Understanding and Building Plugins
• Groovy vs. JRuby
• Web Frameworks of the Future: Flex, GWT, Grail, and Rails

Technorati Tags: ruby, jruby, rails, oscon, flex, gwt, grails, metaprogramming

Here is a recap of the top Ruby-related links for the month of July 2008. Links for The Rubyist are provided by A Rubyist Railstastic Adventure, a tumblelog.

News and Opinion

• The Top Ten Ruby and Rails Happenings in ‘08
• Very Huge List of UpComing Ruby/Rails Books in 2008
• Can Rails Affect Your Business’ Bottom Line?
• Is Twitter Responsible For Rail's Image?
• What is the next killer app for Ruby?
• Ruby’s Vulnerability Handling Debacle
• Dude, That Is So Fringe
• Don't Forget About RubyForge
• Backslapping Ruby’s average performance once again
• Automate Your Rails Deployment
• A close look at three Rails 2.1 bugs
• Ruby's Open Classes - Or: How Not To Patch Like A Monkey
• Rails Inside
• Rails - Simple Asynchronous Processing
• How to improve the Ruby on Rails experience for next Ubuntu release?
• The results of our Ruby development survey
• A Rails 2.1 case study: upgrading the Insoshi social networking platform

Tutorials

• 4 Essential & 7 Optional Ruby on Rails Tutorials
• 4 Simple Steps to Detect & Fix Slow Rails Requests
• It's an HTTParty and Everyone Is Invited!
• Simple Ruby On Rails Full Text Search Using Xapian
• Ruby/Rails interview questions
• Rails for PHP Developers
• Easily grab inbound search terms in Rails using search_sniffer
• Take your Rails application offline with the Gears on Rails project
• Packaging Rails apps for offline use
• Use Google’s SMTP server and Gmail to send emails with Ruby
• 6 Optimization Tips for Ruby MRI
• Sneak Peek: Unhygienic Rewriting Ruby by Example

iPhone and Mobile

• Developing iPhone applications using Ruby on Rails and Eclipse, part I
• Developing iPhone applications using Ruby on Rails and Eclipse, Part II
• Mobilize Your Rails Application with Mobile Fu
• Unit Testing iPhone apps with Ruby: rbiphonetest

JRuby

• Rolling a JRuby desktop application
• Cheri: Swing Builder for JRuby
• Monkeybars: Swing MVC framework for JRuby
• New and Noteworthy in JRuby 1.1.3

Technorati Tags: ruby, rails, jruby, iphone, rubyist, twitter, php, tutorial

Here is a recap of the top Ruby-related links for the month of June. The month of June saw a lot of articles, interviews, and video from RailsConf 2008. The big excitement from RailsConf was news of MagLev, a ruby implementation built on top of a Smalltalk VM. Other big news items to in the Ruby sphere was several security concerns. Links for The Rubyist are provided by A Rubyist Railstastic Adventure, a tumblelog.

Scaling and Security

• Fear and Loathing at RailsConf
• My Mixed Feelings about Ruby
• Rails 10x more productive, Scala 2x. Really?
• Rails can’t scale alone
• Apple security team finds code execution holes in Ruby
• Multiple Ruby security vulnerabilities
• The Big Ruby Vulnerabilities
• Did Rails Sink Twitter?

RailsConf and RubyConf

• Enlightenments from RailsConf 2008
• The Mega RailsConf 2008 Round Up
• 37signals RailsConf 2008 Interviews
• RailsConf 2008 - Saturday Evening Summary
• RailsConf 2008 - Friday Evening Summary
• MagLev
• MagLev - Ruby that scales
• MountainWest RubyConf 2008

News and Announcements

• The Rails Documentation App
• Acts As Community - Rubyist Unite
• New Free Book: Ruby on Rails 2.1
• Google's OpenSocial with Ruby on Rails
• Ruby TMTOWTDI, Episode 1
• De-smalling the Built-in Shoes Manual

Tools and Tutorials

• Bulk insertion of data with ActiveRecord
• Rails - Simple Asynchronous Processing
• Using jQuery with Ruby on Rails
• Glimmer - Using Ruby to Build SWT User Interfaces
• DataMapper - Ruby Object Relational Mapper
• Building a Ruby on Rails application in a week
• Setting up a Rails 2.0 Project without a Database
• PoolParty! An Open Source tool for managing EC2 clusters
• Pool Party Gem For EC2 Computing

Opinion

• Java developers should learn Ruby
• 10 must-have Rails plugins
• The evolution of a Ruby programmer
• Coding in java after a two year affair with ruby
• Johnson - Johnson wraps JavaScript in a loving Ruby embrace.
• Creating a new rails app shouldn't be boring

Jobs

• Ruby Now - The Ruby / Rails Job site
• How not to apply for a job
• How to get a rails job

Technorati Tags: ruby, rails, railsconf, maglev, rubyist, scaling, tutorials

The big hype and spin cycle out of RailsConf this year is the news of a new Ruby implementation, MagLev. MagLev is only the nth implementation of Ruby to make waves, after JRuby, Rubinius, and IronRuby. MagLev is based and powered by a SmallTalk VM from GemStone. Avi Bryant described as a ‘full stack Ruby implementation.’ Avi also said that MagLeve still does not run Rails and is not RubySpec compliant, but it will soon be. From the language in the news and articles available on MagLev, it seems that this implementation of Ruby will be positioned as a ‘enterprise-y’ implementation for large-scale deployment.

• MagLev recap
• Maglev
• The Even Bigger News About Maglev
• MagLev: Gemstone builds Ruby runtime based on Smalltalk VM
• GemStone Reveals Plans for MagLev Ruby VM at RailsConf 2008
• MagLev rocks and the planning of the next Ruby shootout
• MagLev is Gemstone/S for Ruby, Huge News
• MagLev, game over … very possibly
• Maglev and the naiivety of the Rails community
• RailsConf 2008 - Surprise of the Day: Maglev
• MagLev and language implementation
• MagLev handles trees like a monkey

Technorati Tags: ruby, maglev, smalltalk, vm, jruby, rubinius

Hpricot is a HTML parser for the Ruby programming language. With Hpricot you can scan and scape a HTML document. To illustrate how to use Hpricot i’ll write a list the code of a short script I recently wrote. The script grabs all the links for the past week from A Rubyist Railstastic Adventure, a tumblelog.

The general structure of the HTML used by the web page that I will be scraping is something like the following.

One thing to note about the HTML produced by the site we will scape is that the date is optional in the post. The date is only displayed once for a day, so some posts don’t have a given date. Also, there are several other types of posts such as quotes, images, etc. We are only interested in posts with links. Again, the Ruby/Hpricot script will only gather the links for the past week.

Technorati Tags: ruby, rubyist, hpricot, html, scape

This week we saw news of Rails running on Rubinius and several news items regarding Passenger (mod_rails), in particular Dreamhost now has Passenger support. Links for This Week in Ruby are provided by A Rubyist Railstastic Adventure, a tumblelog.

• Rails on Rubinius
• Using Capistrano with Passenger
• Dreamhost with Passenger
• Merbunity - A Merb Community
• Rails Kits
• Importing Data with Rails
• We Don't Need a "Database"
• Ruby on Rails to Nowhere
• Building a Social Network Site in Rails

Technorati Tags: ruby, rubyist, rubinius, passenger, mod_rails, social, twir